Just a reminder to keep your backup files offline. Do not store them in any publicly accessible space. It’s just not worth the risk man. And if you’re working online, you should know this already. If not, then continue reading to learn why it’s absolutely mission critical. Read more »

Here is a lightweight WordPress plugin that enables you to optimize and repair InnoDB and MyISAM database tables. It uses WordPress’ built-in database optimization tools to get the job done. There are lots of great database optimization plugins out there, but this one is aimed specifically at easily optimizing and repairing InnoDB tables. Although it also works on other types of tables, such as MyISAM. Read more »

If you are new to WordPress, or even if you have some experience, it may seem impossible to figure out why something isn’t working as expected. It would be nice if we could just wave a magic wand and have everything “fixed” automatically, but reality requires a bit more effort to diagnose and resolve issues. It would be impossible to describe troubleshooting steps for every possible issue, so this post stays focused on troubleshooting things in general. The goal here is not to explain how to fix all of your problems, but rather to guide you through the basic process […] Read more »

I recently did some time in Microsoft Excel, preparing large CSV files for import into WordPress. Each of these CSV files contained data for 1000 WordPress users. Here is a screenshot showing the structure of the file: Conceptually, the idea is simple: import the data to create actual users for a WordPress-powered site. The trick is to clean the data as much as possible to ensure valid username and password information. Once the data is good, importing is easy using a plugin. Here is a step-by-step tutorial that combines WordPress and Excel techniques to register users en masse from a […] Read more »

After almost three years of blogging here at Perishable Press, I had an epiphany about my author comment links. Way back when, after installing WordPress in a subdirectory called “/press/”, I decided to set the URL for my Administrative User Profile’s website as “https://perishablepress.com/press/”. After all, it seemed to make sense at the time, plus it really didn’t seem to matter; nobody was going to see my personal profile information anyway, right? Wrong. Three years later, I finally realize that it does matter. The URL that you enter as your profile’s website address is the URL that will be used […] Read more »

Several months ago, I changed my email address to stop spam. Since then, I have been updating every instance of my old address that I can find. In WordPress, I edited all of my theme files and updated my profile information in the “Users” admin area. Several days later while digging through the comments table in the WordPress database, I realized that the user-profile update is only pro-actively effective. There were still hundreds of instances of my old email address associated with comment-author information in the comments table. No big whoop for some, but the devastating inconsistency of it all […] Read more »

After investigating some unusual 404 errors the other day, I found myself digging through the WordPress Admin trying to locate the “Subscribe to Comments” options panel. As it turns out, administrative options for the Subscribe to Comments plugin are split into two different areas. First, the S2C plugin provides configuration options under “Options > Subscribe to Comments”, which enables users to tweak everything from subscription messages to custom CSS styles. New to me was the other half of the S2C administration area: the Subscription Manager! Carefully hidden under “Manage > Subscriptions”, the Subscription Manager provides several useful ways to filter your email subscribers: Read more »

Continuing my quest to stop comment spam without using plugins, I have decided to disable comments on “old” posts. In my experience, over 90% of comment, trackback and pingback spam occurs on posts that have been online for over a month or so, just long enough to be indexed by the search engines and picked up by spammers. Especially for older posts that have managed to acquire a little page rank, the frequency of spam attempts is far greater than it is for fresher content. Throw dofollow comment status into the mix, and say “hello” to a hellish number of […] Read more »

Recently, while dealing with the dreaded white screen of death, I found myself unable to login to the WordPress Admin area to manually disable all of the plugins used here at Perishable Press. In the past, I have dealt with this situation by simply deleting all plugin files from the server, however this time, time was of the essence — I had only a few minutes with which to troubleshoot, diagnose, and ultimately resolve the deadly white-screen syndrome. Fortunately, after a few minutes of digging through the WordPress Codex, I had discovered enough information to successfully complete my mission. Now […] Read more »

In this article, I present a simple method for dramatically decreasing the size of your WordPress database by partially emptying old data from the WP-ShortStat table via the following SQL command: DELETE FROM `wp_ss_stats` ORDER BY `id` ASC LIMIT n That is the point of this entire article, which dips into just about everything one might need to know before employing such strategy. If you are familiar with SQL and understand the purpose and functionality of this command, feel free to grab, gulp and go. Otherwise, read on for the full story.. A little context, please.. Many WordPress users enjoy […] Read more »

..And we’re back. After an insane week spent shopping for a new host, dealing with some Bad Behavior, and transferring Perishable Press to its new home on a virtual private server (VPS), everything is slowly falling back into place. Along the way, there have been some interesting challenges and many lessons learned. Here are a few of the highlights.. The tide may be turning for A Small Orange I am certainly not alone when I say that shopping for a new hosting provider and transferring websites is one of my least favorite aspects of web development. In my experience, switching […] Read more »

After switching Perishable Press to its current home at A Small Orange, I began noticing an unusual problem with referrer data displayed in Mint. Specifically, the first item recorded in the XXX Strong Mint data panel — for both “Most Recent” and “Repeat” views — displayed several thousand hits for various site resources, all from the following IP address: 127.255.255.255 zxw59eit.emirates.net.ae Apparently, this particular location represents an invalid “loopback address.” The requested resources appear valid, indicating typical traffic patterns, but the loopback address is not the actual referrer. This issue was preventing Mint from accurately recording mountains of vital referral […] Read more »

Recently, I needed to find and replace all instances of “http://website” in the wp_comments table of the WordPress database. Fortunately, SQL provides a simple way to find and replace data with its wonderful UPDATE function. General Example Using the SQL UPDATE command is straightforward. Here is the general syntax: UPDATE table_name SET field_name = replace( field_name, ‘string_to_find’, ‘string_to_replace’ ) ; Simply replace the table_name and both instances of field_name with your specific information, and then edit string_to_find, and string_to_replace with the desired values. This is pretty standard stuff, but it is always a good idea to backup your database before […] Read more »

Several months ago, we encountered some problems with our hosting company and decided to switch servers. Then, after spending countless hours transferring our army of domains, the new server crashed and our databases were deleted. Further, after the transfer we quickly realized the inferior technological quality of our new host. Thus disgusted, we transferred everything back to our old server and hoped for the best. For the past several months since then, our original server has been running as well as could be expected, all things considered. All functions were running smooth, the error logs were empty, and all was […] Read more »

DB Export Settings Backing up your database as often as possible is essential. For WordPress, as well as for other applications, plugins and other scripts that help automate the task are easily obtainable. However, for several reasons, it is a good idea to understand the process of manually creating a backup copy of your database. This brief tutorial1 should help cement the process into a solid reference. We are assuming that you have an SQL database and have access via phpMyAdmin. Before reading through the gory details written below, check out the screenshot to the left (click on the image). […] Read more »

Recently, every website on our primary server was simultaneously attacked. The offending party indiscriminately replaced the contents of every index file, regardless of its extension or location, with a few vulgar lines of code, which indicated intention, identity, and influence. Apparently, the attack occurred via Germany, through a server at the University of Hamburg. This relatively minor attack resulted in several hours of valuable online education. In this article, it is our intention to share experience with website attack recovery. This article is aimed at website developers, designers, and administrators. Read more »

Projects

About the site

Perishable Press is the work of Jeff Starr, professional developer, designer, author, and publisher with over 10 years of experience.
Check out some of Jeff's books and projects, follow on Twitter, or learn more »

Fun fact: Perishable Press has been online since 2005, and features over 800 articles and more than 11,000 comments. More stats »